Judge Orders Illegally Fired Probationary Feds Rehired
A rebuke of pretextual firings but likely not a permanent solution.
WaPo (“Judge orders Trump officials to offer jobs back to fired probationary workers“):
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to offer jobs back to all probationary employees who were fired last month from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs under directions by the Office of Personnel Management, a ruling that could reinstate thousands of employees who were ousted as part of the president’s push to slash the federal workforce.
Judge William Alsup said at a hearing in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that OPM — which serves as the federal government’s human resources agency — had no legal authority to direct the mass firings in phone calls and written communications last month. He added that individual agencies could follow the steps laid out in a federal law called the Reduction in Force Act to pare back their staffs.
The ruling marked the most significant challenge so far to President Donald Trump’s effort to shrink and reshape the sprawling, 2.3-million person federal workforce. Alsup also extended a temporary restraining order he had granted last month to a group of labor unions and advocacy groups who sued over the terminations.
Alsup castigated a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the Trump administration for submitting “sham” documents and “stonewalling” efforts to gather facts and testimony, incensed that the acting director of OPM, Charles Ezell, refused to testify in court Thursday as the judge had previously ordered.
“I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth,” Alsup told Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelsey Helland, the lone Justice Department lawyer at the hearing.
“You will not bring the people here to be cross-examined,” the judge said. “You’re afraid to do so, because … it would reveal the truth. This is the U.S. District Court. … I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how we get to the truth.”
The judge previously issued a temporary restraining order last month, finding that OPM’s directives to terminate all probationary workers at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, as well as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Small Business Administration and Fish and Wildlife Service, were “unlawful, invalid, and must be stopped and rescinded.”
Justice Department attorneys representing the Trump administration maintained that OPM never ordered federal agencies to fire employees and was only offering guidance, despite the fact that multiple human resources officials — from the IRS and National Science Foundation and the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy and Veterans Affairs — have said OPM ordered them to dismiss their probationary workers, according to court records.
While a temporary victory for the rule of the law, it’s likely a Pyrrhic one. If the agencies can simply turn around and implement a Reduction in Force, these people will be among the first to go unless they’re disabled veterans or otherwise entitled to special protections.
Indeed a Pyrrhic victory, as you say, they’ll go on with firings under some other pretext. Also, it will eventually come down to Trump’s DoJ and the friends of Leonard Leo.
A Pyrrhic victory is one where the costs of achieving are not justified by the gains made. Some hasty reading suggests a legal reduction in force is not as simple, quick, or cheap as hacking away at the agency personnel as the current fascist rulers prefer. But I should let a lawyer or someone with experience in government employment make that case.
Judging by the vitriol directed at the judge by the white house propaganda office, I think I’m at least partly right.
I’m fine with getting RiFed. You get at least 60 days of notice and it is not recorded as an adverse action in your SF-50.
I’m pondering what the point of doing that was. I mean, a decent lawyer could probably have predicted this. And the vitriol is kind of meaningless. I think we would see that regardless of whether it was expected or not.
My best guess is that it was intended to “look good”, to look powerful, to look proactive. Trump is all about how it looks, as opposed to how it is. Good politics probably means handling both.
@Jay L Gischer:
A lot of what the felon does comes down to how he thinks it makes him look. He favors a very adolescent idea of looking “tough,” too, which mostly means being cruel and violent. Unfortunately his base of deplorables laps that shit up…
What shouldn’t work for him is being shot down by judges over and over, which is the very predictable outcome of acting without regard for the law.
So either he expects the illegitimate bought and paid for Crow & Leo court will rule in his favor, vindicating every destructive idiocy he indulges in (and further damaging the country), or he intends to unleash violent mobs on judges to ensure compliance afterward. Perhaps also on those who dare contradict the fascists by suing them.
@Jay L Gischer: With Trump and Musk, the point is always sowing chaos and insecurity. Breaking stuff. Look at Musk’s own words: “feeding agencies into the wood chipper.” Look at the chainsaw antics.
Wonder what the point was? ReallY?
ETA: “So either he expects the illegitimate bought and paid for Crow & Leo court will rule in his favor, vindicating every destructive idiocy he indulges in (and further damaging the country), or he intends to unleash violent mobs on judges to ensure compliance afterward.” Probably this, too.